Start by connecting the SSD to your computer with a dock or cable.

Torx head screwdriver for disassembling the hard drive.A 2.5-inch SATA SSD (I used the Samsung 850 Evo).(I found them at my local Ace Hardware.)Īs you'll see in the video below, my colleague Sharon Profis resurrected her 2009 MacBook Pro with an SSD and agrees with me that the process is simple and straightforward.

Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place. The whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook's hard drive to the SSD). I replaced my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. And they aren't nearly as costly per gigabyte as they once were. They are more energy efficient, more reliable and quieter than hard drives with magnetic, spinning disks. There's a reason that all modern MacBooks and the vast majority of all laptops sold today use SSDs. This process could be awhile, depending on how much data you had backed up, so make sure that you have your laptop plugged into power somewhere that you can leave it for several hours at least.If you have an old MacBook Pro with one foot in the grave, the single best thing you can do to breathe new life into it is replace its traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive. Select your drive from the startup options, and follow the instructions. Select Reinstall from Time Machine Backup. Once you get back to the Recovery mode window, insert your backup drive. (That's a note for all of you stumbling upon this blog in the future, when the OS X is 10.17 Purple Octopus.) Because the internet lives forever.) Basically, unless your computer is brand new, you are going to have to install from Internet Recovery, and continue to upgrade until the OS X is again current. The computer I was working with had been purchased with Maverick installed, so I had to install that first, then upgrade to High Sierra (what is this, 2018? Why yes, yes it is.

Step 12.5: Install operating systemĭepending on when you purchased your MacBook Air, you may have to install the original OS X from Internet Recovery and all subsequent OS X updates until you get to the system your computer was running before you started this whole mission. Only trouble can be caused from here past this point. Let Disk Utility do its job, and then get the heck out.

Macbook air hard drive upgrade